VIENNA, Feb 21 (Reuters - A woman alleged to have murdered
prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp during World War
Two has died aged 86, Austrian justice officials said on
Thursday.
German-born Erna Wallisch died in hospital on Saturday a month after Austria,
prompted by new testimony from Poland, reopened an investigation
into her past that had been dropped in 1973 for lack of
hard evidence.
The Polish findings, based on
witness statements, suggested Wallisch may have committed
murder in the Majdanek camp near Lublin in Nazi-occupied
Poland, Vienna state prosecutors said last month.
Wallisch always said she had only
guarded prisoners.
"We have now ceased
the investigation on account of her death," prosecutors' office spokesman Gerhard Jarosch said.
Wallisch was a camp warden in Nazi Germany's Ravensbrueck concentration camp,
north of Berlin, and at Majdanek in 1942-1944, and settled
in Austria soon after the end of the war.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem,
expressed regret on Thursday that Wallisch could not be
prosecuted before she died.
"(She) and her family
can thank the decades-old failure of successive Austrian
governments for the fact she was ultimately never punished
for ... taking people to be gassed and guarding them so
they could not escape," Zuroff said in a statement.
"Her death should serve
as a reminder to all the governments dealing with cases
of Nazi war criminals that they had best expedite these
prosecutions while justice can still be achieved."
Jewish groups have accused Austria,
which was annexed by Hitler in 1938 and supplied his Third
Reich with many top officials, of a lack of political will
to punish Nazi criminals.
Austria has cited problems unearthing
evidence compounded by the passage of time. More than 60
years after World War Two, few prominent Nazis are believed
to be still alive.
iht.com
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